Susan Shelley: Can the enviros keep the lights on?

In January, former Vice President Al Gore listed his Arlington, Virginia, mansion for rent, asking $9,000 a month.

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Reportedly Gore is living in a mansion in Nashville, though he’s also said to own a spectacular property in Montecito, California. Gore has been “picking up a number of high-value residences across the country, including a 400-acre farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where he moved during the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to a “Celebrity Real Estate” report from Realtor.com on January 27.

And it’s all thanks to climate change. In 2006, a documentary titled “An Inconvenient Truth” showcased Gore’s exaggerated slide presentation asserting that man-made global warming was rapidly destroying the planet. For this work, Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize and the movie grossed $50 million and won two Academy Awards, including Best Original Song.

Since then, the former VP has spent his time flying over the Earth’s crust on private jets, collecting big checks for dinner speeches warning his enraptured audiences of climate doom as they all enjoy high-end cuisine and a selection of fine wines.

Climate change proved to be the golden goose for solar and wind energy that the technology’s fans had been seeking, unsuccessfully, for decades. A book published during the first year of the Reagan administration, titled “Energy, Vulnerability and War,” argued that solar and wind should replace “foreign energy sources” in order to “take a major step away from the present course toward nuclear holocaust.”

But that was not scary enough to overcome the high cost and low reliability of solar and wind energy. Also, it didn’t have a Best Original Song.

Twenty-five years later, climate change did the trick. Gore’s alarming images of roaring hurricanes and melting glaciers launched a worldwide march of government policies mandating and subsidizing “green” energy. A vast ecosystem of new financial species began to develop: certificates and credits and permits, “green” bonds and funds and tax equity investments, brokers and traders and markets, all feeding off the frenzied fear that humanity will die out in a dozen years unless petroleum products are replaced with sunshine, breezes and digested manure.

On Monday, the power went out in Spain and Portugal. It happened at 12:38 p.m. local time, when the grid was relying on solar and wind power for about 78% of the electricity in use.

Monday afternoon, the director of Red Eléctrica, Spain’s grid operator, said the outage was caused by a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network,” which led the Spanish power system to “disconnect from the European system” followed by “the collapse of the Iberian electricity network.”

But on Monday evening, the prime minister of Spain declared, “What caused it is something that the experts have not yet established,” adding, “every possible cause is being investigated.”

This much is known already: between 12:30 and 12:35 p.m. on Monday, solar photovoltaic generation dropped by more than 50 percent, knocking out 60 percent of the electricity supplying demand in Spain in five seconds. “We will find out what happened in those five seconds,” the prime minister said.

Journalist and author Michael Shellenberger reported that just six days earlier, Spain had celebrated their country’s grid operating entirely on “renewable energy” for the first time ever on a weekday. The nationwide blackout “was not an unforeseeable event,” Shellenberger wrote, “It was the exact failure that many of us have been, repeatedly, warning lawmakers about for years – warnings that Europe’s political leaders systematically chose to ignore.”

Shellenberger wrote that because Spain’s electricity system relied mostly on solar panels, wind turbines and inverters, the grid was vulnerable to instability. A traditional grid powered by “heavy spinning machines” like gas turbines, coal plants and nuclear reactors can absorb shocks and sudden changes, such as whatever happened in those five seconds.

Now let’s talk about California, where Monday’s blackout should have made lawmakers sit bolt upright in bed as if they were just visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future.

California governors have already signed the death warrant for the state’s gas-powered electricity generation plants and its one remaining nuclear plant. Even some hydroelectric dams have been dismantled. State law says that by 2045, California will have 100% renewable electricity, defined as solar, wind and a handful of smaller green energy sources.

But every day and night, California relies on gas, hydro, nuclear and imported electricity. If we eliminate those sources by 2045, will we have to bring bottled water and emergency food on every elevator ride? Why do you suppose our public officials never discuss the risks of depending solely on renewables?

Click here to read the full article in the OC Register